Of the wreckage I inherited from my mother-in-law’s hoarder house was one slightly warped—but otherwise unused—12x17 hardcover Winsor & Newton sketchbook.
After sitting on it for some time I decided I would dedicate this oversized tome exclusively to experiments with collage, which I’d previously always conducted in a more ramshackle fashion in smaller formats. A unique cover seemed necessary, so I glued a piece of corrugated cardboard—from a shipping box that contained military-style desert boots, and printed with two tread prints—on the front, and as such I soon found myself privately referring to this project/object as “The Boot Book.” Later additions followed: An Aubrey Beardsley “Merlin” sticker (from the Buckland Museum of Witchcraft), and some red text reading “FALSE WITNESS” (from the stacks of files and folders which contain my endless magazine clippings).
Begun in the July of the previous year, The Boot Book is far from finished: Many blank pages remain, and I often return to previous collages and add new details. It will never be “completed” in the traditional sense, but after the last page is filled I will add the closing date in the front, close the book, and then begin the off-and-on task of stuffing a new volume with flotsam and jetsam.
I don’t consider my collages to be “proper” artworks. Instead I think of them more like sketches, or to draw a parallel with music, improvisation; A place to experiment and work out ideas. I also simply enjoy putting on some records (noise or ambient) and looking through my files, and then arranging images until some appropriate correlations demand to be fixed down permanent with Elmer’s. While the materials are largely culled from magazines or old books, there are also bits and scraps of: stickers, junk mail, product packaging, xeroxes, and in one case (from a different and smaller sketch book) a fabric tag that was torn from my wife’s slippers.
I encourage people of all stripes to work with collage. Not just visual artists, but writers, musicians, occultists, or any individual with some kind of passion or creative interest. If it helps, simply think of the process as making a scrapbook (there’s no reason you can’t include ticket stubs from movies and films, odd items brought back from vacation, etc.).
With all this in mind, the artist Max Ernst (who was no stranger to the collage format) imparted three pieces of germane wisdom:
Creativity is that marvelous capacity to grasp mutually distinct realities and draw a spark from their juxtaposition.
All good ideas arrive by chance.
He who says collage says the irrational.
Pursuing an altogether different tack, Ernst also observed: “Woman’s nudity is wiser than the philosopher's teachings.” I agree with the German—which brings us to the subject of Substack’s content policies:
I’m new to this platform, but at present I’m going to take Substack’s statement on good faith. My collage work does feature a lot of nudity, but “artistic, journalistic, or related purposes” strikes me as a generously broad umbrella and hopefully the presentation here won’t get me shipped off to some cyber-gulag. That said, some of the images probably push the line, so a handful of pages have been completely omitted while others have been cropped. With all that in mind, I present to you in the below gallery, excerpted examples from The Boot Book.
Ernst can have the last line:
To all of us a theatrical death.